The Saga of the Crib
posted in Uncategorized |Short version: buying our crib involved three days of trauma and much driving around south-east Michigan using two different vehicles, but now we have the crib, and all is as it should be.
Long version:
Monday night, we went by Babies ‘R’ Us to pick up a few small things and just look around. Now that the baby’s room is painted, we can start filling it up with stuff. Shannon was very keen to buy the crib, but I talked her out of it, seeing as how we still have around half the pregnancy to go, and plenty of time to do such things.
At dinner later that night, she was inconsolable. Hormones, I guess. So back we went.
Naturally, they were out. But the store in Novi, around 30 minutes away, had three. That’s fine, I said; ask them to hold it for a few days, and we’ll come get it this weekend. But we had a few hours until the Novi store closed, and did I mention the hormones?
A half hour later, we were at the Novi store, and sure enough, they had several in stock. They wheeled ours out to the curb, and I pulled up my car and… er… funny thing. It turns out that Honda Accords aren’t meant to hold cribs. We probably could have fit it in there, but the biggest piece wouldn’t fit through any of the doors, or the trunk. We tried everything, to no avail. So we wheeled it back into the store, and arranged to borrow our neighbor’s pickup truck to come pick it up later that week, and headed home, defeated. I was severely annoyed, but Shannon was very chipper. Hormones, I guess.
We’d planned to return on Thursday with the truck, but I’d forgotten that there was a party for our friend Tonua to celebrate her recovery from breast cancer (her humor and grace through the whole ordeal is one of the most incredibly amazing things I’ve ever seen), so we went Wednesday instead.
Wednesday, as a matter of course, had the worst weather we’ve seen in weeks. Frigidly, bone-achingly cold, with sporradic rain. Wonderful weather for driving your new crib home, in its half-opened box, in an open truck bed. Though we had a tarp, we had nothing to tie it down with, so it kept flaring up in the wind. It took us nearly an hour to drive the thing home from Novi to Ypsi, with frequent stops to rearrange things so that they didn’t fly off and kill anyone, which probably would’ve been bad.
But, finally, we got it home, carried it up into the new nursery, returned the truck, and went to bed. Mission accomplished. The saga of the crib completed at last.
Except for this postscript. The next morning, we were getting ready to go to work, and Shannon couldn’t find her purse. We looked all over the house, peeked into the pickup truck next door: no purse. As we drove to work, Shannon kept getting more and more upset (hormones, I guess). So I dropped her off, and turned around for home. Once there, I scoured the whole house; I went next door with the neighbors, opened the truck and looked around; no purse.
Not long after, Shannon realized that she might have left it in the garage, and sure enough, there it was. All were relieved, but the saga wasn’t quite over yet. See, this was the afternoon we were supposed to go to Tonua’s shindig. Shannon had told me that she’d meet me “outside” after work. I’d assumed that this meant “outside my office,” but when I showed up there at 5, and waited 15 minutes with no sign, I figured I must’ve misunderstood, and she’d meant to meet me outside my office, or outside the place where the party was supposed to happen. So I left, and checked those places: no Shannon. And since I had her cellphone (it was in her purse), there was no way to call her and ask her where she was. So I went back up to her office, and there she was, happy to see me, but very cold. She’d had something go long at the end of the day, which is why she hadn’t been out before.
And to top it all off: Tonua’s thing was cancelled, so we could’ve gone for the crib on Thursday night, after all.
I want my week back. And I’m really starting to get annoyed with hormones (and yes, I know, much more to come). But: the crib’s in the nursery, the truck we borrowed is returned in one piece, Shannon is once again in possession of her purse, our moods are both back at some semblance of equilibrium (though that won’t last), and things are back to normal. At least, as normal as life with pregnancy can be.
This kid had better love this crib. It converts into a bed, so we’ll have it for a looong time. I’m thinking through college.